If you have not watched the film Son of Saul, which won Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and many other awards, “>The Atlantic, and organized the showing of the film for students and staff at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television provides more information on how the film cam into being:
The project’s place in the canon of Holocaust movies begins with its backstory. Nemes, himself the descendant of Shoah victims, discovered a French publication of actual testimonies buried at Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Sonderkommando—primarily Jewish prisoners whom the Nazis conscripted to usher their brethren into the gas chambers and crematoria. Disappointed with existing methods and angry about what he considered Europe’s unsatisfying response to the Holocaust, Nemes created a film within narrow parameters focused on the portrayal of one man’s surreal reality in Auschwitz….
“It is the most personal, intimate, and believable account of what it must have been like for those who interned in the camps and annihilated,” says Tom Nunan, the Oscar-winning producer of Crash and a lecturer at UCLA’s Graduate Film and Television School who calls Son of Saul the most important Holocaust motion picture ever made. “It even brought to life the monsters who ran the camp more effectively than any other Holocaust film.”
In addition to the Oscar, the film is the winner of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and the Critic’s Choice Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
No Holocaust film — or any other film in recent memery — ever did that.
Son of Saul is available to “>hard copy you can order the DVD.
